So how many of you teenagers [or even oldies] out there use the screenshots in OS X on your computer? Pretty effective, isn’t it?

It lets you easily bypass pictures that you would not be able to use and paste onto a word file or a text file or even download onto your computer. So, in cases such as these, if you really, really, and really (!), want the picture, you can simply steal it off the screen – SCREENSHOT IT!

Keeping the ethics of screenshot-ting pictures aside for the moment, let’s delve into the types and the format you screenshot your picture in. Usually your screenshots do get saved in a pre-defined type. Mostly it is a PNG type, but sometimes you may be lucky to get the pictures saved as JPEG s.

But even the fine solutions of “jugaad” lifestyle are not all that fine!

Sometimes, there may be problems [not with the picture –that would be a legal disaster my friend. You essentially stole someone’s intellectual property online. Let us not open that dark door]. But anyway… let’s not get carried away. As I was saying, there may be problems with the extension the screenshot picture has been saved with.

For whatever reason you might want to change the screenshot format, i.e., change the extension of the screenshot picture you have just captured. This might be for a number of reasons –

You are using an app where you need to only upload a certain format of pictures– say jpeg s.

You need to do a project and only a certain file extension is allowed.

You need to upload a picture and the file extension rules are particular. [online things can be a tad prissy]

There may be any number of reasons.

So now, if you do need to change the format of your screenshot, what do you do?

Well, don’t worry. That is essentially the first step to this article [even though it might not be written outright in that way]. Worrying does nothing for you. Just relax. Get through the article. And here’s hoping you will keep some of it [or even better, most of it] to know How to Change Screenshot Format on your Mac OS X, once you are done reading.

It would be a good idea to note here that a Mac’s OS saves most of the images that you take to a PNG type. This is by default. PNG files are pretty great – quality wise. They do not reduce their quality by even a pixel even if you compress the files. Cool right? However, PNG files may have great quality, but that comes at a price – huge size.

This is the reason a lot of people prefer their default picture [screenshot, or image, or capture –whatever you want to call it] type/format to be a JPEG.

A Mac’s OS recognizes the following formats of graphics:

JPG/JPEG

GIF

PDG

PNG

TIFF

Therefore, you can pre-select a type which you want your screenshot pictures/graphics to be. But however, if you want to slum it later, or worse, for some reason if you have to slum it later and HAVE TO change the screenshot format of your capture, just scroll down to know how.

First things First: Launch Terminal.

You can do this in the following 2 ways –

Open Applications [press Shift + A while the Finder is active] > navigate to Utilities (this is a subfolder) > click on Terminal.

You may also use Spotlight to power up Terminal.

Now for your options:

Let us say you need to change the screenshot format to JPG:

Paste the following command into the Terminal window. Then, hit the Return key to execute the user-given command.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg;killallSystemUIServer

If you need to change the screenshot format to GIF:

Paste the following command into the Terminal window. Then, hit the Return key to execute the user-given command.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type gif;killallSystemUIServer

For changing the screenshot format to PDF:

Paste the following command into the Terminal window. Then, hit the Return key to execute the user-given command.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type PDF;killallSystemUIServer

To change the screenshot format to PNG:

Paste the following command into the Terminal window. Then, hit the Return key to execute the user-given command.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png;killallSystemUIServer

And last, but not the least – to change the screenshot format to TIFF:

Paste the following command into the Terminal window. Then, hit the Return key to execute the user-given command.

You should carefully give the commands in the terminal window according to the change you want to make to the format of your screenshot. If you can type in the command successfully, on pressing the return key, the extension of your picture will be duly changed.